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Wood Chips

ETHOS Cooking Stoves Conference in Kirkland, Washington January, 2015.
for more about the next ETHOS Conference see http://www.ethoscon.com/

The ETHOS conference brings together people involved in stove design, dissemination, and testing from Universities, Government, and Non Government organizations, and has themes around the topics of improving cook stove design and performance, reducing emissions, and improving stove adoption, but listening to the needs of the people using the stoves. It ends with the 'lighting of the stoves' which is a demonstration of some of the cooking stoves that people have talked about in the conference.

In addition to capturing photos of the stoves, this year I captured a few pictures of the crowd of attendees comparing stove designs, toasting marshmallows, etc.

The lovely people taking pictures were from CREEC ( Energy and Energy Conservation ) which presented a great analysis of current cooking stove tests and some insights to improve them. They also noted that fans typically fail in Uganda, and there are no fans available to replace them.
For more about CREEC see http://creec.or.ug

StoveTec and Aprovecho presented some interesting innovations in stove design that they hope to field test in the coming year. The light green stove has an insulated top door for adding fuel to their TLUD style stove. The purple stove is their rocket stove that has been optimized for improved particulate emissions, with an improved set of colors.
For more about StoveTec stoves see http://stovetecstore.net/
for more about Aprovecho and stove testing see http://www.aprovecho.org/lab/index.php

This is a Natural Draft Gasifier stove, that is designed with a central column of air that is designed to burn more common Ethopian fuels, e.g. coffee husk and saw-dust (cow dung binder) briquettes in addition to more conventional wood chips.

the air column is drilled on the surface so as to let additional primary air radially into the fuel at different stages to compensate for air clotting that can occur when run with small sized fuel as you go up from along fuel column. This helps the flaming pyrolysis from being air starved due to interlocking of fuel particles. In addition to that, closely spaced holes of relatively larger size were made near the top of the central air column to supply more hot post‐pyrolysis secondary air. The presence of two hot secondary air admission points is meant to supply enough air while keeping the stove short with reduced heat loss.

Once the stove has enough fuel, it is typically started with wood chips, or an accelerant to help the briquettes light, and then in all of the trials it burned without smoke until the fuel tank was filled with charcoal (typically between 60 and 90 minutes later). This is a biochar-producing stove, the stove does not efficiently combust it. Friability and the composition of the char depended upon the feedstocks.

The GEK Power Pallet, is everything you need to go from woody chips to electricity on a shippable pallet. It's built in California, and it's designed with the non-technical user in mind. It's designed for hands-off power generation, and the attached 2011 ALL Power Labs catalog shows schematics and details.